Shell suspends offshore drilling in Alaska after court decision

Royal Dutch Shell will suspend drilling in offshore Alaska after a US court decision and as the oil major streamlines operations following a slump in annual profits, it said on Thursday.

The Anglo-Dutch group said it would halt the project this year after a federal appeals court last week ruled that the US government had improperly relied on inadequate information in the process of awarding licences for exploration in Alaska.

Two weeks after a profits warning, Shell confirmed that net profits dived 39 percent to $16.371 billion in 2013, compared with $26.712 billion a year earlier.

Shell shocked investors earlier this month with its first profit warning for a decade, blaming high exploration costs, pressures across the oil industry and disruption to Nigerian output.

The group also confirmed on Thursday that profit on a current cost of supplies (CCS) basis or current-cost accounting — stripping out changes to the value of oil and gas inventories — sank to $16.7 billion from $27.2 billion.

And CCS profit plunged by 70 percent to $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter, or three months to December, compared with $7.4 billion in the same part of 2012.